People naturally tend to collect contact information, including telephone numbers, email addresses, instant messaging addresses, street addresses, and the like, for entities and individuals to which communications may be initiated. Many of these contacts will include multiple telephone numbers for cellular, public switched telephone network, and Internet telephony devices, as well as multiple email or instant messaging addresses. Further, it is commonplace for people to change contact information, especially cellular telephone numbers and email and messaging addresses, fairly frequently. As such, contact information for a particular entity or individual may change fairly frequently, and address books containing such contact information may quickly become outdated. In addition to the difficulty in keeping contact information up to date, many entities and individuals are reluctant to share certain types of contact information, such as cellular telephone numbers and email addresses, to protect privacy, minimize interruptions, and in the case of email, avoid spam.
Accordingly, many users wish to disseminate contact information, but have no way of preventing abuse of the contact information. Further, many users would disseminate contact information if the use of the contact information could be limited or otherwise controlled based on the user's desires. As such, there is a need for a way to disseminate contact information while simultaneously controlling how the contact information is used by the recipient.